Jean-Pierre Mileur asserts that “the literary tradition, the great tradition of the Romantics, is now being carried on by criticism,” and that modern criticism “is a late Romantic literary genre, a distinctive form of the romance.” By collapsing the boundaries between the literary and the literary-critical traditions, Mileur embarks on a thought-provoking analysis of literary criticism. Criticism becomes a modern version of the age-old quest romance, and the critic becomes a romantic hero—a brooding figure fraught with self-doubt who strives, like Browning’s Childe Roland, despite knowledge of certain failure.The Critical Romance is an exciting intervention in the critical study of criticism that makes a significant contribution to the study of Romanticism as well.
Jean-Pierre Mileur is professor and chair of the English department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity, and Vision and Revision: Coleridge’s Art of Immanence.

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